East of Paris: The New Cuisines of Austria and the Danube

This book is about food as gift, passion, art. You can't sling these recipes together from what you've got in the back of the refrigerator. They require thought, purpose, planning and love. If you love cooking, this book provides nothing less than the opportunity to indulge in a master class in your own home. If you don't cook but just love good food, this book is a window into the exquisite nuance and detail that go into truly great meals. Bouley isn't a celebrity chef because he rides a motorcycle as some of the reviews imply; he's celebrated as one of the great chefs of the world because he brings such creative juxtapositions and complexity of flavor to every dish. Perhaps it's a cultural thing--we live in an era when time is of the essence, anything but the microwave takes too long. As recently as twenty or thirty years ago, everyone's mother and grandmother spent three days just to make a simple spaghetti sauce. A lot of us have forgotten what a difference that makes in terms of pure taste. You simply can't get certain flavors by whipping up something between the time you get home from work and the time your guests show up at the door two hours later. As a working mother of limited culinary talent, I don't think the recipes in this book are really so much hard as they are time-consuming. But that's not a reason to feel frustrated or deprive yourself of what this book offers--take this book as an opportunity to think about our lifestyle, our alienation from food production in this society, and as impetus to consider the virtues of the kind of "slow food" movement sweeping Europe and what kind of more nurturing life-style changes that might imply if we were to allow ourselves that here in the U.S.

A beautifully presented work -- the artistry in the food creations is matched by the artful photographic presentation. A friend who is serious about food and cooking reports, after having had a most successful experience with trying a first recipe from the book at home, that this can serve not just as a cookbook but as a guide to life and how it should be lived. It is tasteful and gracious in every way. We need more like this to bring more light, whether from east of paris or elsewhere, into our kitchens and our lives.

Well, this one sure seems to have sparked some controversy, but count me on the side of the fans. This is the only new cookbook I've seen this season that seems truly original. I'm very tired of the next French, next Italian, next Bistro book that while they may have a few interesting things are old hat to my cookbook collections.Some of the recipes in East of Paris are complex, and I agree that the seasonal organization could have been dispensed with. However, I've already picked up a number of ideas and tips to spur my own kitchen inventions, as well as easily made some of the recipes as written. I'm delighted with this book!

If your heart is in Mitteleuropa so you get dewy eyed for Mozart?s music and smile when Wolfgang Puck says ?vegetables? with an extra syllable and yearn for the taste of strudel then read no further and buy a copy of this book. This is a long cold drink of water for all of us foodies who spend their time in cookbooks wading through French and Italian terms for the tenth recipe for coq au vin and the seventeenth recipe for gnocchi.For the more discerning cookbook buyers among you, this is a celebrity chef coffee table style book of recipes from David Bouley?s restaurant ?Danube? which specializes in recipes from Vienna or in the style of Vienna, primarily those which would have been served to the Hapsburgs rather than simpler fare found in a Prater district caf?. This is Austrian haute cuisine, oddly showing much more influence from northern Italy than from Paris (hence the title of the book). This makes eminent sense as much of northern Italy was once under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.Recipes are divided among seven (7) chapters primarily presenting cuisine by season. Chapters are:Fall: 14 recipes featuring cabbage, plums, truffles, and suckling pig.Winter: 16 recipes freaturing venison, strudel, goulash, and viener schnitzelSpring: 13 recipes featuring salads, rabbit, lobster, and crabSummer: 12 recipes featuring veal shank, lamb chops, mackeral, salmon, and foie grasSignature Dishes: 8 cocktail recipes plus 14 entrees, including 7 seafood entreesTraditional sweets: 15 recipes including the world famous Sachertorte and Linzertorte. YumPantry: 13 recipes for stocks, doughs, and curesMost recipes are relatively long but very well written (Melissa Clark, one of the co-authors, is a professional writer who has written or collaborated on 16 books, including at least one on desserts). Aside from the usual ocurrences of foie gras, black truffles, and caviar one would expect from a cuisine prepared for emperors, there are few unusual ingredients. One of the least familiar is a soft ricotta like cheese named Quark (Topfen in German) which is a soft, fresh, white curd cheese similar to pot cheese. I have never seen it in my local megamart, but then I never looked for it.For the cuisine of Vienna, there are a surprisingly large number of seafood recipes, although I suspect that by the middle of the 19th century, Vienna was within 12 to 16 hours of the Adriatic coast by train.The layout of the book and the photography are as good or better than similar books with equal or higher list prices. The photographs of frolicking sous chefs are kept to a minimum and the photographs really succeed in making the food, especially the pasteries, look appetizing.If you have no cookbook which include the flagship Viennese tortes and strudels, this alone is worth the price of admission. The recipe for Sachertorte, for example, is similar to the recipe in the recent book ?Kaffeehaus? by Rick Rodgers, but seems to achieve a much fancier result with two layers ins

When the caliber of Charlie Trotter says of Bouley: "the most influential chef cookingin the United States" and this cookbook a masterpiece, it should give gourmets notice.One notices the title, East of Paris, something else other than French. In this case, Austrian. Bouley reached this point via a journey leading from his G-Mom's roasted fresh vegetables to cooking in Vienna 49 and from there spending time in Vienna.The cuisine result: peak flavor of ingredients, combining classic technique with world flavors and then having all this translated into an Austrian gestalt. Teaming up with Austrian Chef Lohninger, they offer a combo of Austrian classics, classics upgraded, and others dreamed up from scratch soley with us, the home cooks in mind.The offerings come forth in seasons, with additional chapters on desserts, signature dishes, pantry, wine suggests and sources.The layout is rich and photos are large, stylistic and captivatingly sumptuous.Try the likes of: Rosti Potatoes with Smoked Salmon and Mustard Vinaigrette; Krautwickler=Cabbage Rolls Stuffed with Duck, Dates and Foie Gras; Roasted Prosciutto-Wrapped Striped Bass with Szedediner Sauerkraut; An unbelievably good "Goulash Soup; Wine-Braised Beef Cheeks with Chanterelle Goulash (a good dish to venture into a new ingredient); Rubarb Buttermilk Parfait; Salt-Crusted Lamb with Green Tomato Jam; Tyrolean Wine Soup with Fresh Trout and Smoked Trout Crepes.Of course there are schnitzel and pastry/coffee house items here as well. You'll want to go exploring in this big, wide recipe offering. Be aware though that this is not for the timid home cook who isn't into venturing out with time, technique, or ingreds. But for those who are or on the edge, splurge right into this beaut!This is a definite upper crust cookbook!